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Episode #595 - How to Rebalance Your Portfolio in Retirement

Roger: Welcome to the show dedicated to helping you not just survive retirement, but to have the confidence to lean in and rock it because you're doing the right work in the right way. My name is Roger Whitney. I'm excited to have you here today.

Today on the show, we are going to have a Rockin’ Retirement in the Wild story. Then in our practical planning segment, we're going to address how to rebalance your retirement portfolio as time goes on. Then lastly, we're going to continue to explore travel. We're going to have a conversation with Karen and Shannon, two strong retired women that are single, that are navigating, traveling internationally and feeling confident about it and creating interesting experiences. So, there's a lot to learn there.

Now, next week on the show, we're going to talk about how to quality check your retirement plan, something I've not ever really heard about, but it is critical to having confidence in your plan. You have got to be careful. There's a lot of goals you're entering and the frequency of the goals and the amounts and the investment assets, et cetera. If you're entering into things incorrectly, unintentionally, that could dramatically skew the results of what your plan says is possible, which is what you're going to make decisions on. Garbage in, garbage out. We got to be careful about that. So that's what we're going to do next week.

But for now, let's get to rocking retirement in the wild.

ROCKIN’ RETIREMENT IN THE WILD

In this segment, we share a story from a listener that is retired and doing the work to create a great life. So, I got an email from a listener.

She says,

“I am one of your older listeners, 71 years old. I am starting week three of retirement. Do I love it? not yet. I guess I'm still in the decompressing and transitioning phase.

My pension is not large, but it does fully cover our Medicare supplements, dental, vision and prescription, so I am totally grateful for that. You can never fully plan for life after working, she says. I ask myself every day, can we afford life without a paycheck? Will I be a boring person? Will I stay healthy? Will my people from work forget me, etc. Etc.

We have a moderate lifestyle and can afford to live without touching our required minimum distributions. My husband is 74. Except for large medical bills, house repairs, and vacations, our only grandkids live a plane ride away. So that's where we'd be going for vacations.”

Now, on the surface, this doesn't sound like a rocking retirement in the wild story, does it? Three weeks in, she doesn’t love it yet, has lots of questions. I love this email. I love what you shared because you're asking the right questions. Do you love it yet? You say no, that's normal. Not everybody has to have sunshine and rainbows as soon as they leave work. It's a huge life transition and you've been working for a long time. If you're 71, work has given you a lot of things socially, physically, mentally, etc. This is a big change of seasons. It's okay not to like it at first. It's uncomfortable. You've never done it before. That's normal.

Why I think this is so great is one, you're acknowledging that which is totally cool. But you're also asking the right questions. Can we afford to live without a paycheck? That's an important question. But will I be a boring person? Will I stay healthy? Will I, will the people work forget me? Those are great questions to ask. The fact that you're asking those questions is going to help you take action to notice what actions you can take. What do I need to do to stay healthy? How can I make sure I'm not boring? Maybe the people at work will forget you. If that was the only if the relationship wasn't deeper than the work relationship. Maybe they will. But that's okay. It is a change of seasons that can spur you to be intentional about creating a new network of friends incorporating some of maybe your work friends. These are great questions that will spur you. Many people don't even ask these questions or acknowledge them. They just have free floating anxiety which can cause them to go back to work.

Hopefully these questions will cause you to lean in to create a great life in this new season. That is still a little bit uncomfortable. So, I just want to affirm that that this is normal and it sounds like you're doing the right things.

PRACTICAL PLANNING SEGMENT

In our practical planning segment today, I want to review how to rebalance your portfolio in retirement. Now we are going to do this in the context of building a retirement plan of record as we've talked about on the show and have trained in online meetups, etc. We're assuming that you've created a plan of record where you have your vision, you've assessed that it's feasible and you've made it resilient by putting a purpose for every dollar that you have that is funding either your contingency or your emergency fund your near term peace of mind by building a five year income floor or an upside portfolio to battle inflation over the long term. So, the assumption is that you have this plan of record implemented or created and implemented.

Once you're done with that, though, what happens? Time goes on, your life changes, the markets change, inflation changes, etc. So, what do you do, say, a year from now to make sure that your plan of record is still relevant to your life? That is the point of the exercise. Let's talk through the protocol to do this. The intent here is to update a plan of record and allocation, so it is funding your life as you see it at the time that you're doing it. This will continue to happen over and over again.

Before we get into the protocol that we follow and that we teach in the club, let's talk about what rebalancing is, because that might be a term that you're not familiar with. In portfolio management, you determine what your target portfolio is. If you have a 401k and you filled out a risk tolerance questionnaire, it will generate your target portfolio based on the assessment that you took. Many of us are familiar with this if we've worked with an advisor or filled out one of these risk tolerance questionnaires.

As an example, let's assume that you've determined that your target portfolio is supposed to be 60% stocks and 40% bonds, and that is the target. You or your advisor implement a portfolio that targets that portfolio. Well, as time goes on and different investments perform, either by growing or losing money, you will be off your target or your intention. So as an example, if you were supposed to be 60% stocks, 40% bonds, and a year goes by and stocks do really well, and they go up in value, and bonds, let's say they stay even or they maybe go down, your portfolio will not be on the target that you had initially set. Makes sense. Stocks go up. Let's say they go from 60% of your value of your assets to 70% and bonds go down to 30%, rebalancing is simply selling some of your stocks, buying some of the bonds or some combination there to get you back to the target that you initially had intentioned to have. That's essentially what we mean by rebalancing in retirement, though, rebalancing is different because not only are you going to rebalance a specific portfolio, but you’re also going to refresh the entire plan. The reason we're going to do that is in retirement, unlike just trying to raise our money, we have specific jobs for each dollar that we have.

When do you do this rebalancing and how often? Our protocol says we do it once per year or when there's a big life event that happens, when something happens, markets go down or move significantly or your life changes. Absent that we do this once per year, we do ours in the third quarter of every year. So, this is handy because it's June and next month is the beginning of the third quarter. I'm going to walk through the protocol that we use and that we teach in the club to rebalance a retirement portfolio within the context that you have a plan of record in place.Before I go to step one, remember the intent is to have a plan that is relevant to your actual life because that is what you're trying to fund.

So, step one is to review your spending relative to what your plan of record said. In your plan of record, you, you have determined, this is the amount I need every year to fund my base great life. To make sure I pay for health care and my mortgage and my utilities and my eating out, etc. You made estimates that in your base great life. Step one is to now that we're a year past that, well, are we spending relative to what we thought we were going to spend for this base great life, or are we spending more or are we spending less? Step one is to assess that in addition for your base great life, we want to assess it for those extra wants and wishes that you were aspiring to have when you created the plan.

You want to look at where are you relative to your estimates? Are you above, below, or within a reasonable range near it? If you're above it, then you want to ask the question, is this one off event that likely will not reoccur? Were my estimates wrong and I'm actually spending more than I expected either because of your preferences or because of inflation.

Conversely, if you're spending lower than what your estimate was, is it because you were just wrong in your estimate and you need to reevaluate it or was it that you have to do some internal work because you're naturally very frugal and you didn't do what you intended to do when you were in that planning phase. So, step one is to reevaluate and make an assessment of how close you were to what you thought you were going to do?

Step two is we want to adjust your spending or update your spending in your retirement plan of record to the reality of what you just experienced because you have this extra year of information. That could be, oh, I thought I was going to spend $120,000 a year when I looked at my base great life, I actually spent $130,000. There weren't any one off events. I'm not spending any differently from a habit standpoint. So, it must be inflation, therefore, I will adjust my spending in my retirement plan of record from 120 to 130 to reflect the fact that I personally have higher inflation than I expected. Or conversely, you could adjust it downwards. I've seen it go both ways. Then you're going to update your plan of record to what your new base Great life spending estimate is.

Second, you're going to update your wants or their discretionary spending. And let's assume you assumed you're going to spend 20,000 a year for go-go travel. Well, based on your actual one year experience, because you have a year more of information, you realize, well, really it's only costing me 12,000 and I'm more than happy. Then you would recast your go-go spending estimate to that 12,000 because now you have more information, or conversely, you could do it in the other direction. It could be also updating the timing of some of those discretionary spending items.

Let's say you were going to gift $20,000 to a child and you were going to do it next year and now you realize that they don't really need the money right now and they're not a situation where it would benefit them. So, I'm going to postpone that. Well, then now you would update that spending estimate timing within your retirement plan of record. Now you notice, unlike traditional portfolio rebalancing in retirement, we are starting with rebalancing the plan to your life because the life outcome is the whole point of the exercise. We're not just looking at our investment assets separate from the whole point of investing in the first place. So now that we've updated our base great life spending wants and wishes to be current to where our preferences are at the moment and the information that we've gained over the last year.

Next, we move to update our income estimates and asset values so you have an assumption in your retirement plan of record that you're going to get so much for Social Security or so much for part time work, et cetera. Now that we're a year into the plan, we need to update those. Perhaps you had an intention of working part time and found over the last year or so I haven't had much time for it or I'm not really into working anymore. I'm too busy with the grandkids or whatever you're doing. Well, now's the time to refresh that and say that work isn't going to happen, or maybe you're earning more than you expected. Similarly, if you're getting Social Security, there is a base inflation rate, typically in a retirement plan of record, but maybe your Social Security has increased or not increased at the same amount. Update those numbers so we have relevant data.

Then we go to the asset page. These are the listings of your investment accounts. We want to update the value so we can have the most real time data we have. Now, last year when you did a retirement plan of record, maybe your IRA was at $1 million. Even though you were taking money out of that account, we had good markets, so it was at 1,100,000. Well, we want to update every single account that is going to fund your life to the most recent value. We do this in the third quarter so we can refresh the plan so you want to update those numbers. And then once you've done that, now we have more realistic spending estimates, more realistic income estimates, and the current data in terms of the money you have to fund this great life that you want to create.

Next we assess the feasibility of our plan. We rerun the feasibility test using Monte Carlo or household balance sheet, whatever you have in your process to reassess. Am I still on a safe path? Is this still reasonable given that all this stuff has changed over the last year? We want to reaffirm that. Okay, we reaffirm that. Assuming that it's usually if you are feasible last year, you're feasible this year unless there's some major material change either in the markets in your life. But this is how you identify trends once you've assessed that it's feasible.

Now we're going to go back to making your plan resilient. So, we've looked at it from 1,000 foot level. We're going to close the aperture. This is the next step. And rebuild your five year cash flow estimate, because this is where the real details of planning come in when it comes to retirement. In that five year cash flow estimate, you're going to each year put in the estimate of your income and then you're going to put the estimate of your base great life expenses, which you've just updated, your wants and wishes, which you've just updated and your tax estimate to get an idea of what the deficit is so you can figure out how to fund that deficit from your money. So now we're going to refresh that entire thing and we do this always in the third quarter once you've done that now you have something much more relevant that you can make sure you have the money to fund so you can have confidence to live. From there we go back to well, this was my plan last year. I was going to get this amount of money for my IRA, this amount of money from my savings account, etc. We're going to refresh that because we have new numbers for everything which will lead us to how do I need to change where all the money is to make sure it's relevant to my updated life vision and the fact that it's feasible.

Then we're going to create an allocation study which shows your account by account values and the specific investments in every account and what the purpose of those investments are which you would have created. But now we have updated values and you may find that I didn't make any changes to my spending. So, I am at four years, whereas last year is at five years. But you also, because we have new spending data, maybe you're, you only have three years because you had to update higher the cost for your base great life and your wants and wishes. So now you're more off than you thought you would be. Or conversely, if you had overestimated your spending estimates, maybe you have more of a buffer than you expected. That's why we do the allocation study.

I'll walk through this in a video that we will share in The Noodle email which we send out every Saturday morning. We'll send that out this Saturday. So, if you're not signed up for that, you can go to the Noodle me m and get our weekly email where we can share some bonus content. I'll show the allocation study in that training video and here's where you want to make decisions of. Okay, this is where I'm at. I can see how much I have prefunded because I've done the work. Then you can go through the process of first determining how much of a contingency or emergency fund do I want or buffer you may decide you want more or less based on how you feel about your life circumstance. How much do you want?

Second is refilling that five year income floor. That's the question I get a lot of. Okay, how do I refill this five year income floor a year later? Well, first you need to know what the income floor is given the updated data. That's why we went through all this exercise, because this is about your life. Do I really refill that every single year? So, the answer is yes. You're going to do this once per year, assuming no major life or other changes. You only need to do this once a year. The default is once a year. You reallocate all of your investment assets to refill that five year income floor. Now there's a little bit of nuance here. The default is that you want to have the next five years prefunded, as we've talked about in previous episodes, especially in early retirement. Because in early retirement, meaning prior to Social Security, you're not going to have that guaranteed Social Security income turned on yet. If you're earlier in retirement, you're going to have a lot of lifestyle volatility. Thinking of the lady in the rock retirement, in the wild scenario, she's 71. When you retire and she's only been retired three weeks, you don't know what you don't know. It's a theoretical exercise of what your life is going to be so early on in retirement. It's very common to see goals change significantly because once you get into retirement you decide to rearrange things so early on. I think the five-year income floor is the minimum that you want to have. Now later in retirement, let's say after age 75, you can lower that to a default of three year income floor. And the reason for that is, obviously every situation is different, but the reason is, number one, Social Security will be turned on. So, you'll have this guaranteed inflation adjusted income to help supplement life. Number two is generally in our 70s, especially mid late 70s, our lifestyle volatility decreases, we get our sea legs. We've sort of done a lot of the go-go things. We settle into a routine. So, there's less volatility there.

Number three is, well, when you're 75, there's a lot less of a time horizon that you have to worry about in terms of inflation. You've gone from a 30 year retirement to maybe 15 years of retirement. So, we can moderate things a little bit. Once you've determined what amount you want to refund, then it's going through the more normal reallocation process of prefunding your income floor and then rebalancing in the more traditional way your upside allocation, which is the intent of the entire exercise, this seems a lot more complicated than just a portfolio that you get back to 60/40 because markets moved. It is a little bit more complicated because in retirement it's about funding your life. We want to make sure we have a refreshed plan of record that's relevant to your life as it changes. This is generally done in the third quarter of every year. Again, I'll share the allocation study example to give you an idea of how it might look.

INTERVIEW WITH SHANNON AND KAREN ABOUT TRAVELING IN RETIREMENT

Roger: Now it's time to explore travel. We're going to talk with Shannon and Karen, who are both single, strong, retired women that are navigating traveling internationally. One thing that I like about how they approached it is that they approached it based off of community but also interest. So, I'm going to let them tell their story. So, let's talk to Shannon and Kieran

All right. While we're exploring, how do you take retirement travel to the next level, I thought it'd be great to talk to two people that are retired and that are traveling and have done very interesting trips. It happens to be two single women, Karen and Shannon. Karen has had a chat on the show before Karen, so we're going to link to that. You went from no European travel to travel manic. I don't know if that's the word, close. But we'll have a link to that conversation with you going from being a little bit, having some trepidation about traveling as a single woman internationally to being very comfortable with it.

Then we have Shannon. Shannon, how are you?

Shannon: Good. I'm great.

Roger: The reason I reached out to two of you, because you both shared some photos in the club, because you just together with some others came back from a trip to Europe. So, tell me who, how many people were on that trip?

Shannon: Oh, on the Paris trip, I'd say, I think, there were like, roughly 45. And then there was the travel agent organizer, and then the two hosts. Podcast hosts as well. So that's quite a lot that's big enough to hire a bus to get us from point A to point B.

Roger: So how many people did you know that were going that you had a relationship with?

Shannon: I mean, I only knew about it because Karen told me that she had signed up for this trip, and then she told me about History Chicks, which is the pod.

Roger: I was going to ask what the podcast was. The History Chicks. I love that name.

Shannon: I had heard about the podcast. I listened to it years ago but frankly, I felt it was too long, too long winded. How do I have time for this? It's like two hour episodes sometimes.

Roger: History podcasts can be that way for sure.

Shannon: Yeah and retirement ones can too, as well. I say that from my experience with another podcast.

Roger: We know Jim Sonier in The IRA show. Yeah, we love those guys.

Shannon: While listening to podcasts I want to be doing it as a multitasking function. You know, you're walking, you're driving somewhere, whatever. It might take you a good while too, and then you have time to listen to that whole story.

Roger: So, you heard about the trip from Karen, and I'm assuming the two of you met in the club. The Rock Retirement Club.

Shannon: I heard the interview that she had with you.

Roger: Okay.

Shannon: Karen's like me. She's also widowed and she's single. I didn't know how old Karen was or more anymore than that so, I was intrigued and I decided, oh, I'm just going to message her. Then we ended up finding out a little more about each other in that way. Karen, why don't you relay some memories you had about that first.

Karen: I was, I am, Roger said manic. I started being very frightened of travel, being very afraid to do anything new. I tried more new things and as I have gotten braver, I'm getting more and more interested in pushing my boundaries. One of the boundaries here was to do a pretty long trip and to really do a deep dive into history, because I'm a complete history nerd.

Roger: That was a good organizing principle other than just going to check the boxes for places.

Karen: These are, I call them likeminded people. These are other people who geek out on history and want to dive deep into the details.

Roger: There are a lot of little niche things like that. Oh, yeah, there's adventure travel. There's, you know, the band of brothers type travel. There's even just social travel like we, you know, the cruises that we've done in the club. Shannon reached out to you, so how did you guys develop enough of a relationship that you'd actually want to go on a trip together or at least in a group?

Karen: I was going to go, and I had already put down the money for a single room, and it's significantly more expensive to do a single. Shannon was interested, and it looked like a good deal for both of us.

Shannon: The only international travel I had done before was either with my husband or my kids and I was nervous as hell about going flying to a foreign country that did not have English as its number one language without some kind of person to meet at the other end that I knew. Karen said, I'm going to be coming in kind of at the last minute from another trip, you know, where I'm in Amsterdam. I said I really need a couple days to acclimate so, I knew I would be arriving without Karen there. It was a little nerve wracking. Personally, the reason why I have not traveled alone before, even in the U.S. very much, is because I have a pretty serious shellfish allergy.

Roger: Oh, yeah.

Shannon: Karen said, that doesn't bother me. You know, I'm not intimidated by that. You know, I'm okay with helping you if you need to get some help. So, I said, great. I mean, I was just delighted that somebody was not going to be going, oh, gosh, I don't about this.

We got to know each other better and we decided to meet up on FaceTime more and find out about each other's personal lives a little more. I think I'd seen Karen on some of the meetups on Zoom, you know, here and. But it's the solo one. I remember seeing Karen on the, in the single solo group as well, but that's about it. I didn't, you know, know much better and so we got better acquainted. Then she said, you know, listen to The History Chicks. they have a recap of what they did in a prior Paris field trip and listen to what all the travelers that went that year, last year, what they had to say about it. And I did and I went, oh my God, I have to do this trip. This sounds amazing. It would be a personal challenge to go and fly over there and get set up, go on my own. But I was going to do it until Karen showed up a few days later.

Roger: Because that was the first time you met in person. You haven't met at the roundup or anything like that, right?

Shannon: No, I've been to the roundup, but I was with other members there and we shared accommodations. So, it wasn't like I had gone completely on my own. Actually, I think the very first year I did, I was on my own. but it was a very short trip. It was only like two days. Yeah. Just for the roundup. Then I went somewhere else after. It was.

Roger: So, you had a couple hurdles to overcome.

One is traveling international, which you hadn't done a lot of traveling international alone, knowing that you're going to arrive alone and it's intimidating when you get to a huge International airport, maybe you can read the signs.

Additionally, you and Karen had had some level of relationship because you met within the club and you've been able to see her on meetups. So, you had a sense of each other's spirit. But it's a risk rooming with somebody. And like you guys were saying, cost wise when you're single, it's a big deal because they don't give you, you know, they don't cut it in half just because one person's going. So that was a lot of hurdles.

Shannon: Yeah. So, on the tour, the price was set up to include the hotel and some other stuff. You share with one person and included breakfasts every morning. And it was a big buffet breakfast and it wasn't just this little continental thing and included several tours. I think it was like eight different activities. Then there was a Metro pass she included with the price. The price was pretty hefty, but when I got to looking at everything that was included, I decided this is a pretty fancy but significant trip and it would be worth it to check it off my bucket list.

Roger: Now, Karen, do you normally do group travel in your manic phase?

Karen: I had some, some challenges several years ago and I couldn't move very well. When I went alone, I couldn't move fast enough to change between trains. I missed getting to various venues. People would just leave and I get there five minutes late and they were gone. I'd wasted my money. So, I tried that.

Shannon: It worked, sort of.

Karen: But I decided I like traveling with a group and I like to have a little bit of time before and after. I really like hiring individual guides.

Roger: Yeah, I think that's definitely a really good idea.

So, in traveling with groups, what have you found from your experience between large and small? Too busy, too not scheduled enough. Have you found a sort of a sweet spot that you could share your wisdom on?

Karen: I think it kind of depends on the weather and what they're doing and my own desire to be there. I go anywhere in Paris and I go over and over again. The trip to Amsterdam, I was the only single person on the trip and There were about 30 other people and they were all paired up. I just decided I was going to go for it. I sort of bounced between different people, so I didn't annoy anybody too much, but I had a great time.

Roger: Amsterdam is interesting. I love the Van Gogh Museum. Oh, just amazing.

Karen: I hit just at peak tulip season. Oh, it was amazing.

Roger: It's interesting how this worked with you both in that Karen listens to the History Chicks, which I'm going to have to check out. I love history and she's a single woman and was going as a single traveler and was one of the big draws the fact that you were a curator of museums and this was history? Was that happenstance, or was it a big draw for you?

Shannon: I don't think being a museum person necessarily made a big difference. I mean there were things I wanted to do that had nothing to do with the museum, like the Eiffel Tower, you know, and seeing some of the other national monument locations which are, you know, a lot of them are museums, but not all of them. And I love art museums. Even though I'm sort of a history museum person, I gravitate a lot towards art because I create art myself and I want to see what other artists have done and learn more about technique and their particular history. It’s just something that I like to do and I was drawn to that aspect.

I showed a friend of mine who had been to Paris three or four times before. I showed her the list of all the things that were included on this trip and she said, oh my God, you've. Got to go. This is an unusual trip. I mean we got a private after hours tour of Versailles. We were the only ones there and that is like movie star quality, you know, I mean you just don't get those. How did Laura, the travel agent set that up? I don't know. This is probably why our tour costs a little more because of things, you know, we have these unusual circumstances each time, you know, a la cordon bleu cooking class, which was a pastry, you know, and I mean you just don't get a chance to do those very often.

Roger: So let me ask this question.

A stereotype that comes to mind with tours is more like our grandparents or perhaps parents where there's like five buses and you have five minutes to get to every monument or museum. You're sort of shepherded around.

Newer tours in my experience, which I haven't got on number, but I have a lot of clients that have done them, are much more curated like you talk about. So, did it feel intimate enough? Did you feel like you were cattle?

Shannon: Well, not really.

Roger: Okay.

Shannon: Well Laura, the travel agent, has now done the Paris field trip three times for this group.. Now we're the third, because I think I have Paris down now. I know what we've got to make people happy on this trip. That made a huge difference is that we were not the guinea pigs. She was an expert now on this. And she knew what worked, what didn't work. That really makes a huge difference if you've got somebody who knows what they're doing.

Roger: Those special experiences that you’re not going to get on your own are not actually as difficult to set up if you have at least some sizes of group. By the way, you guys need to give me her contact information.

One thing I've discovered is, last year I did two things with Michael Easter, and I just raised the flag within the club. and we ended up having eight or nine people go on with that many single individuals as well as couples, just because everybody already felt like they had. It was organized and we already had some affinity. So, I'm going to meet somebody there that I know, which feels good.

Karen, what is your impression? Because you've done a number of tours of. Do they feel more curated and personal than what we can stereotype?

Karen: I had less fun alone. I really liked the curation. I read about memories per dollar as a metric for travel. I did a bunch of tours that were just really, really good. But this was maximum memory per dollar. There were little flourishes that you just, you'll think about it forever. We were on a champagne cruise on the Seine at the end, and as we passed under Pont Neuf, the bridge, someone had great big pillowcase of rose petals and threw it so we watched as it fluttered down onto the boat. That will never happen again.

Roger: That happens to me all the time. That happens to me all the time.

Shannon: It was just like it happened. It was magic, really.

Karen: It's those little magic moments that you remember.

Shannon: We were not. I've been on, Like, I've been on a river cruise, you know, on the Dany River. You do feel like you're just cattle on that. You know, you're herded and everything. Whereas this is a concentrated thing. Each day is basically one major thing. That's it. You have all this free time to do whatever you want in the afternoon or in the morning, depending on the time of when it is and, and it was not like a typical bus tour.

Roger: I think that's more normal than we think.

Then did it help in the experience knowing that you had the, the easy button, the travel agent and, and m escorts to help you if you needed it?

Shannon: Right, right. It was all carefully thought out before, so you didn't have, I mean, you just didn't have to do anything. You just showed up and all this was provided for you, you know, this wonderful cocktail hour before you sat down for your lunch. Everything was choreographed.

Roger: No doubt there are some, you know, not so great ones, like cruise lines or anything else. We're going to feature from time to time higher quality travel groups. Like one. I know one of you is in the Midwest and you'll recognize the name like Zingerman. Zingerman is this famous deli in Ann Arbor and they actually do travel trips.

Shannon: Oh, I didn't know that.

Roger: Yeah, and Rhodes Scholar is another one. We're going to try to feature some of these because I think it's ah, if they're done right, they can really be a safe place to enhance the journey because of the community aspect of it.

Karen: This was a lot like Rhodes Scholars with sparkles.

Roger: Okay. Okay. I've never been on Rhodes Scholars. Rhodes Scholars with sparkles.

Karen: They're good.

Shannon: It was geared towards history of women. there were, the history chicks, many of them members in this sort of, what we call this extended fan club type of thing. Some of them brought their husbands though, and they called them roosters. You know, one of them brought her brother. You know, I'm bringing a rooster. What? Okay. I didn't know.

So, let's talk to people that are single about traveling internationally

Roger: Let's talk, let's talk to people that are single that maybe aren't as comfortable traveling or haven't had to for whatever reason. We have a manic traveler that's single and we have a newer international traveler that's single. What wisdom would each of you give or words of encouragement around travel?

Karen: People are nicer than you expect and more helpful than you expect. And you just have to swallow your courage and get out there and try.

Shannon: Swallow your fears. and also, just trust that people like you. They want to have friends too. They want to be encouraged and supported as well. You know, in this group it was great because there was one of the members in our group, she travels solo and she had her 30th birthday when we were all in the hall of mirrors at Versailles and she twirled around and it was like, it was an amazing feeling. I mean, we all were so excited for her. You developed these bonds, you know, particularly I think there were some couples, but I believe that the city people, the people that came without their spouses, we all kind of just bonded a little more tightly. We became true friends and became interested in each other and communicated on WhatsApp as a group, that was the convincing factor for me that I was going to be okay on this trip was to have ah, Laura sets these up. She says every time that she sets up a group before we go. That way you guys can talk about what you want to do on your off hours, who you want to have dinner with, you can set all that up on your own. That was really smart and, and I think that it is very, very helpful to have a really easy way for people, in a private way to talk with the fellow travelers ahead of time, get to know them a little bit.

Roger: Then it's like it's okay to be nervous or afraid, but you do it anyway because you know you'll be safe.

Shannon: You've got somebody there that's looking out really. She's the bottom line. She's looking out for the safety of everybody.

Roger: It's probably good to start with something like a Zingermans or Rhodes Scholar or something that is reputable and known.

Karen: This is not without difficulty. Two people on our trip fell and had fractures.

Shannon: Did they go to the ER? One of them did for sure. Or the other one? I'm not sure.

Roger: That is, that is really when the host or the production team of the tour, that's when they prove themselves or not. Right?

Shannon: Yeah. I complimented her. I said, you are a calm person. You steadied the ship. She was great. She said this is the, this is the trip that's had the most foibles.

Roger: You know, I like that word.

Shannon: You know, people, running into some sort of a problem, like the same health issue or whatever. She was a little nervous, I think, but she didn't show it. She was very stable. She was great.

Roger: Well, I appreciate the two of you coming on to share your story from a manic perspective and you know, going on my own, not for the first time Necessarily, but first time, long time, international. I think they're great bookends to show and hopefully be an exemplar for someone because we always have all this stuff in our head. It's so helpful to see people like us that are a little bit ahead on the trail saying, no, it's fine.

Karen: It works.

Roger: It makes all the difference. So, thank you so much for sharing that.

Karen: I knew Shannon, because of the RRC, would have similar values, and that mattered too.

Shannon: That helped. It really did. She is a practical person. She was concerned about her budget. Sometimes we talk about that. So that really helped, I think quite a lot. I didn't feel it was necessarily a safe topic to bring up with any of the other people.

Roger: Yeah, we're a little bit different that way. thank you so much. I can't wait to hear about what each of you do next.

Shannon: Okay, we can't wait.

TODAY’S SMART SPRINT SEGMENT

Roger: On your marks, get set, and we're off to set a little baby step that you can take in the next seven days to not just rock retirement, but rock life.

All right, in the next seven days, when it comes to rebalancing, all I want you to do is to go to your calendar and schedule a morning, an evening and afternoon. Sometime in the third quarter. Give yourself, say, an hour, hour and a half, put it on your calendar and name the event as your retirement rebalancing meeting, and write out a structure for how you're going about doing this and have it on the calendar. That way you can see it so as you get closer to that date, you can start to gather the information that you need in order to execute the meeting.

Get it on the calendar. That way you don't have to think about it and wonder when you're supposed to do it.

BONUS

Last week we ended with my grandfather's missions in World War II flying in a B-17. He has a couple more entries related to him getting home. The next one is the description and dates of his trip overseas.

“Left Patrick Henry on April 25th, and the boat left Hampton Road on the same day at 11:00am. Really hated to leave but arrived in Africa nine days later via boat May 4, 1944. We were stationed at the Camp Coastal for nine days. Left Africa 13th of May and arrived in Naples, Italy, the 16th of May. Then were sent to Bogolia, Italy, 20 miles north of Naples to await assignment. Left Bogolia the 20th of May and arrived in Fragia, Italy.

21st of May we were assigned to the 342nd Bomber Squadron of the 97th Bomber Group. Met up with the rest of the boys. Sure a swell reunion.”

Next week we'll have his going home entry. Hope you have a great day.

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